Being in the Honors Program has given me the opportunity to live in Honors Housing. The third and fourth floors of Lyon Hall are an Honors house fondly known as "Harwood". It is a coed house, with the gentlemen on third floor and the ladies on fourth.

Harwood is my home and I love living there. It is hard to imagine how different my college experience would be if I lived elsewhere. I love both the people and atmosphere of Harwood. Since it is an Honors house, academics are respected. Study time is honored and it is easy to find someone who is both willing and able to help with homework. This does not mean that we don't have fun, because, believe me, we do. There is a sense of unity in the house that shows whenever we get together. We participate in many crazy activities as a house, and have a great time doing it. Lots of crazy things happen in college and this page is a testament to that.

One of the first things I did when I came to college was cut off my hair. I cut off twelve inches and donated it to Locks of Love, and organization that makes wigs for children who have lost their hair due to medical reasons. Here are my before and after pictures.

This is dinner before the Engineer's Ball. We ate at Legends before the dance. The food was good, but I was more impressed with the view. The restaurant was the top floor of a building across the street from campus, so you could see all of Iowa State University from the windows by our table.
The dance was fun also. Crazy things happen when you get a bunch of Engineers together!

One Sunday afternoon, we decided that it was too nice to stay inside, so we gathered up an assortment of food from various locations and had a picnic on Central Campus. In addition to eating, we played frisbee and a couple of the girls from the House hosted a knitting lesson.It was my first time ever knitting.

This is a chair in my room. I don't remember who decided that it looked like Cookie Monster, but it will be the "Cookie Monster Chair" forevermore.

We had a Dance/Costume Party in our den for Halloween. I went dressed as Juan Valdez. I ended up winning the Costume contest for the girls. I won a package of candy apples. They were delicious.


My roommate, Mandy, and I made jack-o-lanterns to put outside our door for Halloween (except I'm not really sure that they can be called "jack-o-lanterns" since they didn't have any light inside them). It was the first time that Mandy had ever carved a pumpkin. It was exciting, except our room smelled like pumpkins for a week after.

The social chairs of Harwood decided to declare one weekend in November as "The Best Weekend Ever". Events included such things as Dance Dance Revolution, a photo scavenger hunt, movies, frisbee golf, gravity club, cigar club, and having nice toilet paper. Above is a picture from gravity club. We dropped a toaster oven, a pumpkin, and a TV from a tower to see them be smashed.